Expanding on famous father’s work to earn acclaim of his own
CHRISTOPHER Tolkien (95) edited and published a huge body of writings left by his father, J.R. R. Tolkien, extending the world of Middleearth created in The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (195455), but also providing an unparalleled portrait of a creative life.
Becoming literary executor upon his father’s death in 1973, Christopher took charge of 70 boxes of papers ranging from Oxford lectures to lexicons of invented Elvish.
A collection of the primary legends of Middleearth, The Silmarillion, eagerly anticipated by legions of fans, had been worked and reworked since 1917, with constant evolutions in style, names and plot. Successive drafts, mostly unfinished, had been left in disorder. Christopher began a scholarly edition with variants and notes, but then he decided to publish a single narrative without commentary and eliminating discrepancies, including any with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
In the barn of his home in West Hanney, Vale of White Horse, Oxfordshire, he scrutinised drafts, made selections, and harmonised details before typing it all up on his father’s old machine. He had the assistance of Guy Gavriel Kay, a young Canadian who is now a fantasy novelist. Though it contained “a great deal of my own personal literary judgement”, Christopher said, editorial insertions were minimal.
Published in 1977, The Silmarillion sold in millions. Though many reviewers and readers felt it too austere, and missed the downtoearth hobbits, it quickly established itself as a devotees’ favourite and deeply enriches the Middleearth canon. Yet regret over the extent of editorial intrusion spurred
Christopher to publish further books detailing his father’s development of the stories, producing an unparalleled case study in literary creativity.
Christopher was born in Leeds, the third son of Edith (nee Bratt) and John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, professor of English language at the university there. His father’s imagination struck such a chord with him that Christopher once said he grew up in Middleearth and found the cities of The Silmarillion “more real than Babylon”.
Even at 4 or 5, listening to his father read The Hobbit in draft, he would point out continuity errors. After his father became professor of AngloSaxon at Oxford, Christopher went to the Dragon school there, and later to the Oratory school in Caversham, Berkshire. Three years off with an irregular heartbeat from 1938 coincided with early work on a sequel to The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, which was written partly to entertain him. He encouraged his father’s tendency to hobbit whimsy, curbed only at the urging of the Oxford don C.S. Lewis.
After undertaking an abbreviated undergraduate course at Trinity College, Oxford, at 17, Christopher trained in 194445 with the RAF in South Africa. His father sent him the chapters of Frodo and Sam’s journey to Mordor as they were written. Christopher responded with detailed, constructive critiques.
AFTER the war he joined the LewisTolkien circle, the Inklings, taking over readings of The Lord of the Rings in his crisp, sonorous tones. He completed an English degree at Trinity, then took a BLitt on the Old Norse saga of King Heidrek the Wise. A critical edition in 1960 shows, like his father’s work, an aptitude for medieval linguistic analysis and a fascination with the misty border between legend and history.
Christopher lectured at Oxford on Old and Middle English and Old Norse from 1954, and produced editions of three
Canterbury Tales with Nevill Coghill. In 1975 he resigned as fellow of New College to focus on his father’s literary legacy, without regrets. But he never neglected the professor’s work on medieval language and literature, editing and publishing J.R.R.’s translations of the
Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo (1975), a collection of his landmark lectures, The Monsters and the Critics (1983); and much later Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary (2014); plus two volumes of narrative poetry on
The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun
(2009) and The Fall of Arthur
(2013).
The Letters of JRR Tolkien
(1981) was edited with his biographer Humphrey Carpenter.
As for Middleearth, Pictures by JRR Tolkien (1979) and
Unfinished Tales (1980) were followed by The History of Middleearth, in 12 volumes (198396), tracing how his father wrote The Silmarillion, The Lord of the Rings
and much else. Christopher’s personal insight was vital in extracting and ordering this from mostly undated manuscripts.
Much bigger successes commercially were The Children of Hurin (2007), woven from multiple texts, and two books following a tale apiece, Beren and Luthien (2017) and The Fall of Gondolin (2018). This, his 24th volume on his father’s work, was his last.
For outstanding contribution to literature, in 2016 Christopher received the Bodley medal. He remained effective custodian of his father’s papers after lodging them at the Bodleian Library in Oxford in 1979, overseeing access by other scholars.
He loathed the computer, and vowed never to use email unless it were made illegal not to.
Controversies over the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies were an unwelcome intrusion. “For him, his father’s works started and ended as books,” said David Brawn of his UK publisher, HarperCollins. Christopher married the sculptor Faith Faulconbridge in 1951. In 1967 they divorced and he married Baillie Knapheis, nee Klass, who had worked some time before as his father’s secretary. He died on January 16. He is survived by Baillie and their children, Adam and Rachel, and by Simon, the son of his first marriage. — Guardian News and Media